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Comment by h4kunamata | Hacker News Reader

I find it ironic people mad at Denuvo and yet play games like Battlefield which enforces kernel level spyware nonetheless haha

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The main difference that Denuvo does nothing to improve the experience of the end user.

I don't like Anti-Cheat solutions with elevated privileges but they have (at least for some time) reduced the number of Cheaters in games like Valorant or BF, for most users this is at least a somewhat understandable tradeoff. Denuvo on the other hand is DRM and a pure tradeoff in favor of the publisher at the cost of the consumed.

I would say it was wildly successful in Valorant.

Valorant has cheaters in pro league that still play tourneys and compete for cash. I'd say otherwise.

There is a user argument for anti cheat as a user = less cheater.

There is no user argument for DRM, if anything there are many against it = higher game price/less money for the actual game and devs, indirect funding of DRM software, worse performance, higher system requirements, worse preservation, worse privacy, longer loading times, online requirements, worse usability, machine activation restriction, bugs...

Kernel level anti-cheat also doesn't introduce a giant performance penalty like Denuvo-style DRM. People just want to play their games without it still stuttering on top of the line hardware.

Anticheats will still have obfuscated code for obvious reasons (they don’t want to be reversed). Not sure they don’t induce some performance drop too - though maybe smaller compared to bad Denuvo implementation.

Pretty strong to say there's no argument. I don't agree with it, but I imagine people would say reducing piracy leads to more money for the studio, which means more resources that can be put toward the game. Lots of people believe that, and we don't have a lot of data on opportunity costs for games including Denuvo.

I personally just hate it and think Piracy is overblown. The only other industry I've seen be this hostile to users is Music/Photoshop. Putting an iLok key into my computer feels bad.

>but I imagine people would say reducing piracy leads to more money for the studio

they be wrong, there have been multiple studies even by the EU on how piracy does not reduce revenue.

Besides that studios continue to pay for denuvo even after there game has been cracked. The article literally is about how all games with denuvo get bypassed on the day of the release, which means they pay for nothing except a worse experience for there paying customers. At this point it's just a compliance checklist by corporate suits and actual people working on games and paying customer pay the price.

>a worse experience for there paying customers

Actually, the legit buyers experience is better because this bypass is not a "proper" crack

1. They have to disable Windows security features before playing

2. Reboot their PC twice (before and after)

3. They're still running Denuvo code, same as legit buyer

Legit buyers experience is thus significantly better than pirates.

>Legit buyers experience is thus significantly better than pirates.

Only for this type of bypass using hypervisor, there are more and more actual cracks every month by voices38 that don't need any of that and deliver better performance and usability to pirates.

How are you protecting yourself at the game itself spying on you?

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